SOPHIE CALLE: PUBLIC PLACES – PRIVATE SPACES
The Jewish Museum San Francisco
March 7 – June 28, 2001
The Jewish Museum San Francisco presents SOPHIE CALLE: PUBLIC PLACES – PRIVATE SPACES. The show includes an installation of photographs and texts by French conceptual artist Sophie Calle and select pieces of Calle’s work from Bay Area collections. This is Calle’s first museum show in San Francisco.
Director Connie Wolf said, “It is very exciting to have an internationally acclaimed artist such as Sophie Calle at The Jewish Museum San Francisco. Her art is consistently engaging and the work in this exhibition perfectly reflects the Museum’s mission - to approach Jewish issues and make them relevant in a contemporary world.”
Sophie Calle’s installation was inspired by the Orthodox tradition of eruv (literally meaning blend). An eruv is a symbolic boundary made of wires, string or neutral barriers, erected in and around observant Jewish communities. The tradition is a practical response to the religious prohibition against carrying objects outside of one’s home on the Sabbath. By transforming the space within it from public to private, the eruv establishes a collective property through which one can move as within a house. Essentially, the eruv expands the boundaries of the home.
Inspired by the tradition of eruv, the artist journeyed to Israel in the mid 90’s to interview 14 inhabitants of Jerusalem - Israelis and Palestinians – and asked each person to take her to a public place in that city they considered private. The intimate stories reveal ordinary public places that simultaneously exist as private places, all which lie within the boundaries of the Jerusalem eruv. Fourteen photographs and texts document the stories of the Jerusalem residents and 20 photographs follow the series of electric poles, wood and wire which comprise the Jerusalem eruv. Neither the texts nor the photographs disclose the cultural identity of the interviewee, and not knowing who is Jewish or Palestinian is a poetic commentary.
Sophie Calle sets up a conceptual connection to the eruv by investigating how individuals, both Jewish and Arab, religious and secular, transform space and make it their own. Issues around land, boundaries and religious law are common considering the contested nature of Jerusalem, but Sophie Calle has managed to infuse these with a compassion that elicits intimate reflection.
The stories and the accompanying photographs are both politically and personally charged: a photograph of a wall symbolizing the separation between people, a bench on which an admirer kept vigil and contemplated a love during the Six Day War, a street where a little girl was hit by a bus. The texts construct and inform the photographs and are simple and poignant. Reflecting on the bus accident the woman says “It’s been many years but I drive along here almost every day and I can’t help remembering everything. In a strange way I consider that piece of street mine. Part of my body remains there.”
Recently, the eruv tradition has been a controversial and political issue. Last year communities such as Palo Alto, California and Tenafly, New Jersey, battled in the courts over the legality of religious boundaries and have grappled with the issue of public v. private space. These recent eruv controversies that have erupted across the United States and been local news headliners, make this exhibition incredibly topical and important. For the past twenty years Calle has investigated private lives and made aspects of them public through her work. To allow for a more complete understanding of these issues in Calle’s oeuvre, the show includes selections of her work from Bay Area collections. Included are two pieces from The Sleepers (1979), a series where the artist invited others to sleep in her bed while she documented the various activities every hour on the hour. For eight straight days different people inhabited her bed and the photographs and texts of the event testify to her emerging interest in the voyeuristic aspects of photography. Also on view are two pieces from The Blind (1986), a series where Sophie Calle continued her atypical approach to photography by asking several people who had been born without sight to describe their image of beauty. She then photographed what the participants described. Several works from the Les Tombes (1990) and Autobiographical Stories (1992) series are also on view in this portion of the exhibition.
ARTIST’S BIOGRAPHY
Sophie Calle is one of France’s best known Conceptual artists. Born in 1953 and currently living in Paris, Calle has received wide acclaim in the U.S. for her collaboration with writer Paul Auster, which resulted in her piece Double Game and the publication of a book with the same title. Her last museum show in the Bay Area, Sophie Calle MATRIX/Berkeley 133, was curated by Larry Rinder and was held at the University of California Berkeley Art Museum in 1990. Recently she had exhibitions at the Centre National de la Photographie in Paris, the Camden Arts Center in London, and at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, as part of the show The Museum as Muse.
SOPHIE CALLE: PUBLIC PLACES – PRIVATE SPACES was organized by The Jewish Museum San Francisco, with assistance by Natasha Boas Ph.D. The installation eruv is on loan from the Musée d’art et d’histoire du Judaïsme, Paris.
THE JEWISH MUSEUM SAN FRANCISCO
121 Steuart Street (between Mission and Howard Streets), San Francisco
